[T]he mainstream thrust of anti-intellectualism, as it stands today, characterizes thinking itself as an elitist activity. And even if one were to get excited about leaving the contortions of mental effort behind, today’s anti-intellectualism makes no corollary call for us to return our fingers to blood and dirt, to discover organic bliss, to become more autonomous in our ability to fulfill our basic, most primal needs, or to become one with the awe-inspiring forces of the cosmos. It does not demand, as did Thoreau, “Give me a Wildness whose glance no civilization can endure,–as if we lived on the marrow of koodoos devoured raw.” It does not invite us to “throw ourselves like pride-ripened fruit into the wide, contorted mouth of the wind,” as did F.T. Marinetti. And needless to say, it most certainly does not imagine, a la Carolee Schneemann, that the liberated power of female erotic pleasure could gain us entrance to an ecstatic experience of our bodies no longer defined in opposition to intellectual inquiry. Instead, it promotes something more like an idiocracy, in which low-grade pleasures (such as the capacity to buy cheap goods, pay low or no taxes, carry guns into Starbucks, and maintain the right not to help one another) displace all other forms of freedom, even those of the most transformative and profound variety. “Don’t think, say the stupid, says the vulgar herd, why try to think?” wrote Artaud, who often experienced thinking as a sort of bodily agony. “As if without [thinking] it were possible to live.”
Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty (via heteroglossia)
